On Sat, 29 May 2010 14:27:24 -0700 (PDT), mike
wrote:
Hmm, you must work on 'puters alot!
I try to avoid computahs whenever possible. However, they do pay for
my decadent and lavish lifestyle, so they're difficult to avoid.
One of my favorite places to hang
out up till a couple years ago was the local 'puter recycler
The local senior citizens group runs a recycling operation.
http://www.californiagreybears.org
http://www.californiagreybears.org/images/computer.jpg
The computer part was profitable when China was buying everything.
These days, it's borderline. There also was a recycling operation at
the local dump, but that went away about 3 years ago:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/e-waste/index.html (kinda old)
The problem is that I can't return anything for credit or refund. I
have to make an astute guess as to whether I can fix it, how much it
will cost to fix, who I could sell it to, and whether I can make a
profit on the repair. It's speculation at it's worst. My guess is
that I lose money on all the computer rebuilds, but do fairly well on
the HP printers and plotters.
OK, now I've got a couple new programs to learn,
MHDD is a good program for testing hard disks. That's one that I use
when I get a pile of drives to test. I use the "magic-boot" version.
The only catch is that I once wiped a drive by accident. Be careful
with live data.
Yeah, I know, I seem to keep slipping back into the stone age, been
that way since 1993, one step forward, etc.. There's DSL at work
so at least I'm getting a little familiar with that - kinda makes
surfing at home at 56K a bit of a drag though...
Locally, the monthly price of a DSL account is only slightly more than
a dialup. When I had the only DSL in the neighborhood, most of the
neighbors were "borrowing" my bandwidth (with my permission). You
might ask around to see who's got a cable modem (faster than DSL)
that's willing to share.
Thanks, I'll have to see if I can get this SmartMonTools in 8.04.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/smartmontools
Ah, thanks for the link!
The hard part was trying to remember the strange names of the various
distributions. 8.04 was Hardy Heron, a truly memorable name that I
can recall for about 10 minutes.
--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060
http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558